Babel and Diversity

After reading Mirty's conjecture regarding the Tower of Babel and the modern internet, I spent some time thinking about my own understanding of the meaning and message of that event. This builds on a discussion I had many years ago with my father, regarding the question of how there can be such divergent races and cultures today, if all humanity descended from a single couple only 4000 some-odd years ago.

The answer we came up with was to assume that just as God diversified spoken languages and spread humanity across the earth at the time of Babel, as we are explicitly told in the biblical verses, so too were their physical/racial and cultural characteristics diversified. In fact, the descendents of three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Yafes, as listed earlier in the parsha, map to the Semitic (hence the name), African, and Caucasian racial/cultural groups respectively.

In looking to extend this concept, I thought about the connection between three events from the early part of the Torah, in each of which humanity was transitioned from one mode of living to another, via a direct act of God:

1) Man was originally created as a single, solitary being. According to many interpretations, this being had both male and female characteristics and was thus completely self-sufficient. However, God then decided that "it is not good for man to be alone" and split this creature into two separate beings, man and woman, who were thereafter meant to seek one another.

2) Man and woman then lived in the Garden of Eden with no obligations or responsibilities except to avoid eating from one particular tree. After they did so, God altered* their mode of living to one in which they would have challenges and obstacles to overcome throughout life, especially in the areas of child rearing, earning a living, and concerns about mortality.**

3) Humanity lived in a single city and had a unified purpose and mindset. God intervened to vary their languages, cultures, thoughts, appearances, etc. and then to physically scatter them across the globe.

The common thread among all these episodes is that they involve a change - an evolution, if you will - from uniformity and singularity to diversity and multiplicity. First, one being became two, then those two were thrust from a simple, pastoral, unchanging existence into a tumultuous and complex one, and finally, humanity itself was radically diverged.

It seems that in God's final plan, human coexistence is not to come too easy - it must be earned through difficult effort. There are multiple barriers even to marital harmony, and how much more so to world harmony. These barriers include basic differences of culture and outlook, of language and communication style, of physical and emotional perspective.

Perhaps the goal is that through the struggle to restore our lost unity, each of the diverse groups will have to understand, learn from, and eventually come to appreciate the good in the others. Through this clash, something new will develop, much greater than the sum of the parts. In the end, what will then be built is not just a uniformly pristine and perfect single world, but something infinitely better - the best of all worlds.

Update: Had another thought while reading this post on the flood. Perhaps along with diversifying the races, animal/plant species were diversified as well. This could explain why there are so many more species today than would have fit on the ark, and/or than there would have been time for evolution to account for in the ~4000 years since the flood.

* I don't use the word "cursed" since actually that word is not used in any of the verses in regard to either the man or woman themselves - only the "snake" and "ground" are cursed.

** Built upon ideas in the excellent book "How Good Do You Have To Be?" by Rabbi Harold Kushner